django: postgres full text search mixin

When using postgresql with django, you can use Full text search. It’s really easy way to search text in many fields, at once such as title, content, and so on.

You can see detail information in official django docs - Full text search

Here’s example using SearchVector to search in body_text and blog__tagline both.

>>> from django.contrib.postgres.search import SearchVector
>>> Entry.objects.annotate(
...     search=SearchVector('body_text', 'blog__tagline'),
... ).filter(search='Cheese')
[<Entry: Cheese on Toast recipes>, <Entry: Pizza Recipes>]

In ListView, you can simply add searching function in get_queryset()

class PostListView(ListView):
    model = Post
    context_object_name = "posts"
    template_name = "post/list.html"

    def get_queryset(self):
        queryset = super(FilterMixin, self).get_queryset()

        searching = self.request.GET.get("searching", "")

        if searching != "":
            search_kwgs = SearchVector('title', 'description')
            queryset = queryset.annotate(
                search=search_kwgs).filter(search=searching).distinct()
        else:
            pass
        return queryset

But if your app has many model (and also many ListView) for searching fields, it’s little bit annoy to use this searching method. So I made my custom BaseSearchMixin to use easily.

from django.contrib.postgres.search import SearchVector


class BaseSearchMixin(object):

    def get_queryset(self):
        queryset = super(BaseSearchMixin, self).get_queryset()
        if not self.search_fields or self.request.GET.get('searching', '') is None:
            return queryset

        return queryset.annotate(
            search=SearchVector(*self.search_fields)
        ).filter(
            search__icontains=self.request.GET.get('searching', '')
        )

You can inherit this BaseSearchMixin with search_fields.

class PostListView(BaseSearchMixin, ListView):
    model = Post
    context_object_name = "posts"
    template_name = "post/list.html"
    search_fields = ('title', 'description')

Done, looks great!